Dominican Republic

Its independence dates from 1844, when a secret society of Santo Domingo liberals broke with Haiti after twenty-two years of rule from Port-au-Prince. That independence was interrupted: from 1861 to 1865 the republic was a Spanish province again, and it was restored only after a two-year guerrilla war that drove Spain out. The country's modern institutions — a single national army rather than provincial militias, a customs service built by American officials, a border patrolled as a national frontier — were made in the half-century between the Restoration and the First World War, largely under foreign financial pressure.

The Dominican Republic matters out of proportion to its size for three reasons. It is where Spain built the first colonial city, cathedral and university in the Americas, and therefore where the Spanish imperial system was tested before it was exported. It is where the United States first used the customs receivership, in 1905, and where it mounted the largest Latin American intervention of the Cold War, in 1965, carried out with an inter-American fig leaf. And it is one half of a single island on which two states diverged more sharply than any other pair in the world: the Dominican economy is roughly ten times the size of Haiti's, and the border between them is now partly a wall.

At a glance

What did Spain build on Hispaniola, and what survived to 1821?

Before 1492 the island was divided among five Taíno chiefdoms — Marién in the north-west, Maguá in the north-east, Maguana in the centre, Jaragua in the south-west and Higüey in the east. They farmed cassava and maize on raised mounds, fished, and played a ball game on formal courts; the Spaniards who described them also recorded a population that no one can now count. Estimates run from a few hundred thousand to more than a million, and the argument is unresolved because the evidence is a handful of early censuses, tribute rolls and missionary complaints. What is not in dispute is the speed of the collapse: by the 1520s the encomienda system had worked most of the island's people to death in the gold placers, and the first enslaved Africans had been landed to replace them.

Santo Domingo was the laboratory of the Spanish empire. Columbus reached the island on his first voyage in 1492; La Isabela, founded in 1494, was the first European town in the Americas and a failure; and the city of Santo Domingo, laid out from 1496 and moved across the river in 1502, acquired a cathedral, a university and a royal audiencia within two generations. From Hispaniola the conquests of Cuba, Jamaica and the mainland were launched. Then the island emptied. The gold ran out, the sugar plantations of the sixteenth century were small, and the Spanish Atlantic moved on to Mexico and Peru. By 1600 Santo Domingo was a poor frontier town whose main business was cattle and hides.

The seventeenth century made the island's modern geography. French buccaneers settled the western third, and the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 recognised French Saint-Domingue — the colony that became Haiti — which turned into the richest sugar colony in the world while the Spanish east stayed thin, rural and poor. Spain ceded the whole island to France at Basel in 1795; a French expedition under Toussaint Louverture occupied the east in 1801; and after Haitian independence the east was invaded again in 1805 by Dessalines, whose troops sacked Santo Domingo and killed civilians on the way. Spanish rule returned in 1809 with British help, and the period that followed — known in Dominican history as the España Boba, the "feeble Spain" — was one of near-total neglect, in which cattle ranchers and mahogany cutters ran the country and the crown barely noticed it.

Independence from Spain came on 1 December 1821, declared by the outgoing captain-general, José Núñez de Cáceres, who wanted the colony to join Bolívar's Gran Colombia rather than become a black republic. That calculation failed within weeks. On 9 February 1822 Jean-Pierre Boyer, president of Haiti, marched into Santo Domingo at the head of some 10,000 troops and was handed the city without a fight. The east was not conquered; it was annexed by acclamation from a frightened elite, and it stayed annexed for twenty-two years.

Why did the east break with Haiti in 1844?

Haitian rule gave the east things it later preferred to forget. It ended slavery, which had been decaying but was still legal, and it made the whole island one jurisdiction for the first time since 1697. It also imposed costs that fell on everyone. Boyer's government, saddled with the indemnity France demanded in 1825 for recognising Haitian independence — 150 million francs, later cut to 60 million — taxed the east hard and paid its soldiers by requisition. The constitution barred whites from owning land, so the old landowning families lost their estates and many left for Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia. The university closed for want of students and teachers; church property was confiscated and the clergy deported; the rural code bound labourers to the land in ways that freedmen in the east, who had never been plantation slaves in large numbers, simply ignored.

The occupation was also weaker than it looked. Away from the towns, Haitian officials could not enforce their own laws, and the eastern countryside kept its own arrangements: communal grazing land held in undivided shares (terrenos comuneros), cattle, mahogany cut for export, and a good deal of smuggling. This mattered later, because the nationalist account of the occupation as twenty-two years of unbroken military brutality is a construction of the later nineteenth century, built to explain why the east had to separate. What is certain is that the movement for independence began in the city, among young men who had been educated in Europe or in the few schools that survived.

On 16 July 1838 Juan Pablo Duarte and eight others founded a secret society called La Trinitaria, with cells and passwords and a flag of their own. It grew slowly, was betrayed, and survived. In 1843 the Trinitarios allied with a Haitian reform movement that overthrew Boyer; the new president, Charles Rivière-Hérard, promptly exiled or jailed the Dominican leaders. The timing of the declaration was set by fear that Buenaventura Báez, a mahogany exporter who sat in the Haitian assembly, would beat them to a settlement with France. On 27 February 1844 the Trinitarios raised their flag at the Puerta del Conde in Santo Domingo and declared the republic. Francisco del Rosario Sánchez read the declaration; Matías Ramón Mella commanded the militia; Duarte was still in exile.

Haiti did not accept it. Rivière-Hérard invaded in March 1844 with three columns and perhaps 30,000 men, and was beaten at Azua on 19 March and outside Santiago on 30 March, largely by cattle-ranching militia who fought with machetes and lances in terrain they knew. Faustin Soulouque, who had himself crowned emperor of Haiti, tried again in 1849 and was defeated by Pedro Santana at Las Carreras, and again in 1855–56, when 30,000 Haitian troops came over the border in three columns and were broken at Santomé and Sabana Larga. Those wars fixed the border in roughly the line it still follows, and they made the army — and Santana — the centre of political life for a generation.

Why did the first republic annex itself to Spain?

The republic's first constitution, adopted on 6 November 1844, was liberal in form and dictatorial in one article: Article 210, forced through the assembly by Santana, gave him extraordinary powers for the duration of the war. He used them at once, jailing and exiling Duarte and executing María Trinidad Sánchez, the independence heroine, for refusing to name conspirators. From that point the state was a contest between two men and their clients: Santana, the cattle rancher from El Seibo with a private army of peons, and Báez, the exporter from Azua with a following among the merchants of the capital.

The country they fought over was poor in a particular way. There were almost no roads, so the regions lived apart. The south was cattle and mahogany, organised around the hacienda; the Cibao valley grew tobacco for export to Germany, on smallholdings, through itinerant traders who carried it to Puerto Plata and Monte Cristi. Tobacco gave the Cibao a large class of independent peasants and a merchant elite with an interest in order and open ports — the social base of the Liberal party that later called itself the Blues. Neither region generated enough revenue to pay for a state, so governments printed money. Báez issued 18 million uninsured pesos in 1857 to buy the tobacco crop, sold it for hard currency abroad, and ruined the planters who had sold it; the Cibao rose, besieged the capital, and after a year of civil war Santana took the city and the presidency again.

Behind the faction fighting lay a strategic fear that never went away: that Haiti, with several times the population, would come back. Every government of the first republic offered the country to somebody — a protectorate to France, a naval base at Samaná to the United States, annexation to Britain — in exchange for protection. In 1861, with the treasury empty and the American Civil War removing the Monroe Doctrine as an obstacle, Santana did it: in March he proclaimed the restoration of Spanish sovereignty, and Spanish troops landed at Santo Domingo.

The annexation was a mistake for everyone except Santana, who was made a marquis and kept command of the army. The Spanish empire found a colony that cost more than it earned and a population that would not accept it. The Church returned and the clergy were resented; Spanish racial legislation offended the free coloured majority; and Santana himself was sidelined within a year, having printed 33 million pesos in the expectation that Spain would redeem them. On 16 August 1863 a party of fourteen men under Santiago Rodríguez crossed the border, raised the flag on the hill of Capotillo near Dajabón, and called the country to arms. Within a month a provisional government sat in Santiago under José Antonio Salcedo, and the war had become a guerrilla campaign across the whole island.

The Restoration War lasted two years and was won by disease as much as by fighting. Spanish columns held the towns and could not hold the country; the rebels cut their supply lines, destroyed the railway, and withdrew burning what they could not carry. Yellow fever and malaria did the rest: between 9,000 and 12,000 Spanish soldiers died of disease, against about 4,000 Dominican dead from all causes. In March 1865, with the American war ending and the Cortes unwilling to fund a colony it did not want, Isabella II annulled the annexation. The last Spanish troops left in July. The republic that emerged was independent, bankrupt, and covered with the ruins of its own towns.

How did debt turn the country into an American protectorate?

Restoration did not bring peace. Between 1865 and 1879 there were twenty-one changes of government and at least fifty armed uprisings, fought by provincial caudillos with private militias against a national army that existed mainly on paper. Two parties crystallised: the Reds, based on the southern ranchers and mahogany exporters and led by Báez, and the Blues, based on the Cibao tobacco growers and led by Gregorio Luperón. Báez's programme was annexation to the United States, which he pursued to the end of his career.

The mechanism was a loan. In 1869 Báez's government appointed a London agent, Edward Hartmont, to raise money. Hartmont issued more than £400,000 of bonds and delivered about £38,000 to the Dominican treasury. With that, and with the promise of American money to follow, Báez signed a treaty of annexation in November 1869; a plebiscite in February 1870 returned 99.93 per cent in favour on a turnout of about 30 per cent, held under a state of siege. On 30 June 1870 the United States Senate refused to consent, 28 votes to 28, short of the two-thirds required. It was Ulysses Grant's first major defeat, and it left the Dominican Republic with a debt it could not service and no protector to pay it.

The next thirty years were run on credit. Ulises Heureaux — Lilís — who held power from 1882 until 1899, some of the time through figureheads, gave the country its longest stretch of order before Trujillo and paid for it with other people's money. He borrowed from the Amsterdam house of Westendorp to build a railway from La Vega to the port of Sánchez, and when Westendorp failed in 1893 he mortgaged the customs houses to a New York firm, the San Domingo Improvement Company, for two loans of $1.2 million and £2 million. When that ran out he printed 5 million uninsured pesos in 1897, ruined the merchants, and was shot by Cibao tobacco men at Moca on 26 July 1899. He left a foreign debt of more than $35 million, fifteen times the annual budget.

What followed was the sequence that made the receivership inevitable: four revolutions and five presidents in six years, while Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium sent warships to press their nationals' claims. Theodore Roosevelt's answer was the corollary that bore his name. In January 1905 the United States took over the Dominican customs houses under a modus vivendi: an American receiver-general kept 55 per cent of collections for the creditors and remitted 45 per cent to the government, and within two years the external debt fell from about $40 million to $17 million. A treaty of 1907 made the arrangement permanent, moved the receivership under the Bureau of Insular Affairs, and lent the republic $20 million from a New York bank to settle all outstanding claims — which made the United States its only foreign creditor. The peso had already been replaced by the dollar in 1905, at five to one.

The protectorate was not a colony, and it did not bring stability. Ramón Cáceres, who governed from 1906 until he was assassinated in 1911, kept the country quiet and solvent; after him it came apart again, with a succession of presidents, juntas and archbishops lasting months each. By 1916 the American navy was landing parties to protect customs revenues, and the Dominican Congress was impeaching a president for accepting American demands. The intervention, when it came, was justified in Washington as an obligation under the 1907 treaty.

What did eight years of American occupation change?

The Marines landed on 5 May 1916 and fought a short conventional campaign against the forces of Desiderio Arias, the war minister who had just seized the capital. Resistance collapsed within weeks; the fighting cost the Americans seven killed and the Dominicans perhaps a few hundred. In November, after the Dominican Congress had elected a president who refused to accept American conditions, Woodrow Wilson imposed a military government under Rear Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp. The republic kept its flag, its laws and its courts, but not its sovereignty.

The military government did what Progressive-era administrators did at home: it reorganised the tax system and the budget, built roads and schools, ran a censorship, and created a single national constabulary, the Guardia Nacional, in 1917, to replace the provincial forces that had made coups easy. That last reform was the most consequential thing the occupation did. Within thirteen years the officer corps of the Guardia would produce Rafael Trujillo, and with him thirty-one years of rule.

The occupation's economic policy was less neutral. In 1920 the military government enacted a land registration law that required formal title in a countryside where most land was held communally or by occupancy. Thousands of peasants lost the ground they farmed; sugar companies with lawyers legalised titles to land they had acquired cheaply. The dispossessed formed the guerrilla bands known as gavilleros, who fought the Marines for four years in the provinces of El Seibo and Hato Mayor with machetes, old rifles and better knowledge of the country. By mid-1922 the army's own reports counted 1,137 guerrillas killed or wounded against twenty Marines killed — a ratio that says as much about the nature of the war as about its conduct.

The timing was cruel, because the war coincided with the greatest sugar boom the island had ever seen. European beet production was destroyed in 1914–18, and the price of raw sugar rose more than fourfold between 1914 and 1920; Dominican exports rose from 122,642 tons in 1916 to 158,803 tons in 1920. The danza de los millones made a few Dominican families rich and then, when the price collapsed to $2 in 1921, bankrupted them, leaving the industry to American corporations: by 1926, twelve American companies held more than 80 per cent of the 520,000 acres in large estates. The Haitian cane cutters who worked those estates in increasing numbers were the beginning of the modern migration question.

Withdrawal came from politics in Washington rather than pressure in Santo Domingo. Harding campaigned against the occupation in 1920; the Hughes–Peynado agreement of 1922 provided for a provisional government, elections, and continued payment of the debt under the 1907 treaty; and on 18 September 1924 the last Marines left, two years after the organised gavillero bands had been broken. Horacio Vásquez, elected in March, had already been inaugurated in July. The Dominican Republic entered the 1920s with a professional army, a customs service that paid its creditors automatically, a sugar economy owned abroad, and a political class that had learned to look to Washington.

How did Trujillo rule for thirty-one years?

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina was a former telegraph clerk and sugar-estate guard who had joined the constabulary in 1918 and risen through it under the occupation. By 1930 he commanded the Guardia Nacional, and when a revolt broke out in Santiago in February against Vásquez's attempt to extend his term, Trujillo kept his troops in barracks and let the rebels win. He then had himself nominated, and was elected in May 1930 with 95 per cent of the vote in an election run by an army he controlled. He took office on 16 August, and except for two intervals in which he governed through his brother and through figureheads, he ran the country until 1961.

Less than three weeks after his inauguration, Hurricane San Zenón destroyed Santo Domingo. The official response was energetic — martial law, reconstruction, a new city — and the political use of it was immediate: the rebuilt capital was renamed Ciudad Trujillo, the highest mountain became Pico Trujillo, and a cult of personality was installed that eventually included 1,800 statues and a plaque on every public work reading "Era of Trujillo, Benefactor of the Fatherland". The instruments of rule were the party, the army and the police. The Dominican Party, founded in 1931, became the only legal party; public employees were legally required to "donate" 10 per cent of their salaries to it; adults were pressed to carry the membership card known as the palmita, without which a man could be arrested for vagrancy. By 1940 the military took 21 per cent of the budget, and by the late 1950s at least seven intelligence services watched the population and each other.

The regime's economic model was personal. Trujillo bought the foreign sugar mills, took monopolies on salt, rice, milk, cement, tobacco, coffee and insurance, and by 1961 his family owned between 50 and 60 per cent of the arable land, businesses accounting for four-fifths of commercial activity in the capital, two banks, an airline, a shipping line and the port facilities, on an estimated fortune of $800 million. Roads, harbours, hospitals and factories were built — often to serve his own plantations and factories. After 1945, and especially in the 1950s, the regime pushed import-substituting industry behind high tariffs, which gave the country a manufacturing sector and a structural taste for protection that outlasted him.

Abroad, Trujillo made himself useful and then indispensable and then intolerable. He welcomed Spanish Republican exiles and, in 1940, several hundred Jewish refugees who were settled at Sosúa — a policy of blanquismo, of whitening the population, that was inseparable from his anti-Haitianism. He declared war on the Axis after Pearl Harbor, survived an invasion by Dominican exiles launched from Cuba in June 1959, called himself the world's "Number One Anticommunist", signed a mutual defence agreement with Washington, and hosted the 1955 "Fair of Peace and Confraternity of the Free World" to mark twenty-five years in power. After 1956 his foreign operations turned murderous: the disappearance in New York of Jesús de Galíndez, the killing of the Spanish exile José Almoina in Mexico, the attempt on Rómulo Betancourt's life in Caracas in June 1960. The Organisation of American States imposed sanctions that August, Washington broke relations, and Eisenhower cut the sugar quota. On 30 May 1961 Trujillo was shot dead in his car on the road to San Cristóbal by a group of Dominican conspirators, armed and encouraged by the CIA.

What happened at the Massacre River in 1937?

The frontier Trujillo inherited was not a national border in any modern sense. It was a line through country where people spoke both languages, crossed to market at Dajabón and Ouanaminthe, and had done so for generations. Haitian labour had been recruited for the sugar estates since the American occupation, and the 1920 census counted 28,258 Haitians in the country; by 1935 the figure was 52,657, in a population of about 1.5 million. Most were cane cutters on the southern and eastern estates. In the north-west, Haitian families had lived for decades, many of them Dominican-born and legally Dominican under the constitution's jus soli, and the small surplus of that dry country moved to Haitian markets because there were no roads to Dominican ones.

Trujillo made that frontier a project. His "Dominicanisation of the frontier" changed place names from French and Creole to Spanish, banned Vodou, imposed quotas on foreign workers, and required Haitian labourers to leave after the harvest. On 2 October 1937, at a reception in his honour in Dajabón, he announced that the problem was being solved and that 300 Haitians had already been killed at Bánica. Between 2 and 8 October, army units brought in from other parts of the country killed Haitians across the north-west and in parts of the Cibao, with rifles, machetes, clubs and knives; many were driven into the Dajabón — the river both countries call the Massacre — and killed there.

The death toll cannot be established. Estimates run from 12,000 to 35,000, and most historians settle around 20,000. The range is wide because the killings happened in isolated country, the bodies went into the river or into shallow graves in acid soil, and no proper count was ever attempted. Lauren Derby's archival work indicates something more disturbing than the number: most of the dead were probably not migrants at all but people born in the Dominican Republic, legally citizens, whose Haitian parentage had become the mark of a category rather than a fact of nationality.

The famous detail — that soldiers made people pronounce perejil, "parsley", and killed those who trilled the r like French or Creole speakers — is repeated in almost every account, and it is the part of the story that rests on the thinnest evidence. Derby and others have shown that the shibboleth story comes largely from later testimony and journalism, that it is not how the killing was organised, and that it has become a way of making an arbitrary massacre legible. The massacre itself is not in doubt: American diplomatic reports found Krag rifle bullets in the bodies, and only the Dominican army had Krags.

Haiti's president, Sténio Vincent, first denied that anything had happened, and the settlement was arranged between governments rather than between peoples. Under an agreement signed in Washington on 31 January 1938 the Dominican Republic paid an indemnity of $750,000, of which $525,000 was actually disbursed — about $30 a victim, of which survivors are said to have received cents. The agreement conceded no responsibility and described the dead as illegal immigrants. Trujillo then colonised the border with Dominican settlers, built the first road along it, and made the frontier a garrison. The ideology that justified all this — antihaitianismo, the claim that Haiti is African, poor and dangerous and the Dominican Republic Hispanic, Catholic and civilised — was systematised in the 1940s and 1950s by writers including Joaquín Balaguer, who in the 1980s would still call Haitian migration a "biological invasion".

Why did Juan Bosch last only seven months?

Trujillo's death did not settle anything. His son Ramfis held the country for a few months and executed most of the conspirators; the Trujillo family went into exile in November 1961; Balaguer, the figurehead president, opened the regime enough to survive, then was forced into a seven-man Council of State and resigned in January 1962. Elections were held on 20 December 1962, and Juan Bosch won them with 59.5 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 65 per cent — the first free election in the country's history, and the first won by a party with a mass base rather than a caudillo's clientele.

Bosch was a writer and historian who had spent twenty-three years in exile and had founded the Dominican Revolutionary Party in Cuba in 1939. He was a social democrat of the mid-century kind, and he governed like one. His constitution of 29 April 1963 — promulgated two months after his inauguration on 27 February — gave labour the right to organise and to share in profits, protected illegitimate children and pregnant women, reduced the Church's role in schools, and promised agrarian reform. He also tried to bring the armed forces under civilian control, which in a country where the army had been the government for thirty years was the one reform the army would not accept.

The coalition against him formed quickly: the officer corps, the bishops, the business elite and the American embassy, which had grown cold towards him during his first months. The coup came on 25 September 1963, led by Colonel Elías Wessin y Wessin, and installed a civilian triumvirate behind military power. Bosch went to Puerto Rico. The constitution was suspended, the parties were restricted, and the sugar estates and the army settled back into the arrangement they preferred.

Why did the United States invade in 1965?

The triumvirate lasted nineteen months. On 24 April 1965 a group of reformist officers, led by Colonel Francisco Caamaño and calling themselves Constitutionalists, seized the presidential palace and demanded Bosch's restoration. Wessin's loyalist units counter-attacked with Second World War aircraft, strafing and bombing the city; by 26 April hundreds of civilians had been killed and the Constitutionalists had armed several thousand supporters in the old town. On 28 April, with the loyalists losing, the American embassy requested troops, and Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines — ostensibly to protect and evacuate foreign nationals, in fact to prevent "a second Cuba".

The intervention was large and unilateral before it was multilateral. American strength reached about 22,000, including the 82nd Airborne and the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade; the Constitutionalists held a few square kilometres of the capital with perhaps 2,700 soldiers and 5,000 armed civilians. On 23 May the Organisation of American States created an Inter-American Peace Force, which never exceeded about 1,750 men — a Brazilian battalion, and small contingents from Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and El Salvador — and which gave the operation a hemispheric cover it had not had when the first helicopters landed. A ceasefire at the end of August and a provisional government in September set up elections for 1 June 1966. Balaguer, campaigning on reconciliation and order, beat Bosch with 57.7 per cent to 39 per cent, on a turnout of 76 per cent, with Bosch's supporters excluded from much of the process. The last foreign troops left in September.

Between 2,850 and 4,275 Dominicans were killed, most of them civilians, along with about 47 American servicemen. The political result was the opposite of what the intervention's architects said they wanted: it installed the man the coup of 1963 had made, and it gave the Dominican armed forces twelve more years of licence. The deeper result was a conviction, general on the left and widespread among ordinary Dominicans, that reform could not be achieved against Washington — a conviction that shaped the caution of Dominican politics for a generation.

How did Balaguer's twelve years end in a stolen election and a transition?

Joaquín Balaguer governed from 1966 to 1978 with the army behind him and a programme that mixed repression with construction. Political activity was legalised, the parties operated, and elections were held in 1970 and 1974, both of them after the main opposition withdrew late in the campaign in the face of government violence. Public works — roads, dams, a good deal of concrete — went up everywhere. Between 1970 and 1975 the economy grew at an average of 9.4 per cent a year on high sugar prices, foreign investment and American aid, and people spoke of the "Dominican miracle". The other side of it was a security apparatus that killed and disappeared people, and a rural population whose complaints were treated as communism.

The election of 16 May 1978 was the hinge. Antonio Guzmán of the PRD took 52.36 per cent to Balaguer's 42.99, on a turnout of 76 per cent; when the count turned against him, Balaguer ordered troops to the electoral centre and had ballot boxes destroyed, and claimed victory. Jimmy Carter refused to recognise the result and suspended aid, and the army, given no support from Washington, backed down. Guzmán was inaugurated on 16 August 1978 — the first time in the republic's history that an elected president had handed power to an elected opponent.

The transition held but did not deepen quickly. Guzmán himself, facing a corruption scandal involving his daughter's husband, shot himself in July 1982, and the austerity programme of his successor, Salvador Jorge Blanco, produced serious riots in 1984. Balaguer returned for ten more years in 1986, won again in 1990 in a violent campaign, and in 1994 beat José Francisco Peña Gómez by 42.29 to 41.55 per cent in an election that observers regarded as stolen. The settlement — the Pact for Democracy — cut his term to two years and barred him from standing again. Leonel Fernández won the resulting election in 1996 with Balaguer's support, and the pattern of the next decades was set: alternation between the PLD and the PRD, with the old caudillo's party as kingmaker.

The economy after 1996 was the story. Fernández privatised state enterprises and opened the country to foreign investment; Hipólito Mejía, elected in 2000, presided over the collapse of three major banks in 2003, a rescue that drove the peso from about 16 to the dollar to nearly 60 before it recovered into the 40s, and a surge of inflation; Fernández returned in 2004 and rode a commodities boom to eight years of fast growth. Danilo Medina governed from 2012 to 2020, raised taxes in his first year and spent the revenue on schools, health posts and conditional cash transfers. In 2020 Luis Abinader, standing for the Modern Revolutionary Party, won with 52.52 per cent and ended sixteen years of PLD rule; in 2024 he was re-elected with 57.44 per cent, on a platform whose hardest edge was migration.

How did tourism and remittances replace sugar?

For most of the twentieth century the Dominican Republic sold sugar. It was a plantation economy with a peasant sector, a foreign-owned mill sector and a labour force recruited seasonally from Haiti. The change was made by policy, not by nature. In 1971 the government passed the tourist incentive law, Law 153, which created a tourism infrastructure fund, gave hotel investors tax holidays and low-interest loans, and built the airports and roads that resorts need. The results are in the room count: 1,134 hotel rooms in 1970, more than 20,000 by 1990, and some 70,000 by 2019, more than any other Caribbean country. Air arrivals went from 278,000 in 1975 to a million in 1987; in 2025 they reached 8.86 million, and total visitors including cruise passengers passed ten million in 2023. Tourism accounts for about 11.6 per cent of GDP once its indirect effects are counted.

The second engine was the free zone. Free-zone manufacturing began in the late 1960s, and the model — imported components, Dominican labour, duty-free export to the United States — grew into some fifty zones employing around 200,000 people and exporting $6.2 billion a year by 2019. What they export has changed: garments and footwear gave way to medical devices, electrical components and pharmaceuticals, which is why the country's exports now look more like a small European economy's than a Caribbean one's. Mining was added in 2012, when the Pueblo Viejo gold mine opened as the largest in Latin America; gold became one of the country's biggest single exports, worth $1.6 billion in 2019, alongside ferronickel from Bonao.

The third engine does not appear in any port. Dominicans abroad sent home $12.4 billion in 2025, roughly a tenth of GDP, up from $7.4 billion in 2019 and $3 billion in 2006. The migration that produced those transfers began in the 1960s, accelerated after 1978, and made the Dominican-born population of the United States pass a million by 2000, most of them in New York. Remittances are the country's most reliable counter-cyclical income: they rose during the pandemic year of 2020 and have risen every year since, and they fund consumption, housing and a great deal of small business.

The World Bank's own summary is that the economy has grown significantly faster than the Latin American average for twenty years. Gross domestic product reached $127 billion in 2025, or about $11,000 a head; growth was 5.0 per cent in 2024 and 2.1 per cent in 2025, with 4.7 per cent forecast for 2026. On the World Bank's national poverty line, the share of Dominicans below it fell from about 31 per cent in 2021 to 17 per cent in 2025. That performance is real and it is uneven. The electricity system loses a large share of what it generates; the tax base is narrow and the informal economy large; the east coast is a chain of resorts and the south-west is not; and the country's exposure to hurricanes — David in 1979, Georges in 1998, Jeanne in 2004, Fiona in 2022 — remains the largest single risk to its capital stock.

What is the Haitian question now?

The border that Trujillo garrisoned is now a policy. In 2010 the constitution was amended to define all undocumented residents as "in transit", and Article 18 of the present text adds that "all foreigners are considered people in transit as defined in Dominican laws". In 2013 the Constitutional Court applied that to a woman born in the country to undocumented Haitian parents, Juliana Deguis Pierre, ruled that anyone born after 1929 to parents classed as in transit had never been a citizen, and ordered the civil registry audited back to 1929. Around 200,000 people, most of them of Haitian descent, were exposed to statelessness. A naturalisation law, 169-14, followed in 2014; 288,466 people applied under it, and only a few hundred grants were made. Between August 2015 and January 2016, 15,754 people were deported and another 113,320 left.

The pressure has increased since. In February 2023 the government began building a wall along 164 kilometres of the 392-kilometre border, with watchtowers, sensors and drones. In August 2023 Haitian farmers restarted work on an irrigation canal on the Massacre River, and the dispute over water from a river that both countries depend on became a diplomatic crisis, with the border closed and the Dominican army reinforced. Deportations have continued at a scale that human rights organisations describe as collective expulsion, and Abinader's re-election in 2024 was built in part on their popularity.

The economics underneath the politics are brutal and simple. Haiti's economy is roughly a tenth the size of the Dominican Republic's, its state has collapsed into gang rule, and several hundred thousand Haitians live and work in the Dominican Republic, many of them now in construction, agriculture and tourism as much as on the sugar estates that once absorbed them. The Dominican Republic needs that labour and resents it, in roughly equal measure — a contradiction that the 1937 massacre did not resolve but consecrated. The country that made the Caribbean's sharpest national border is now the one that polices it hardest.

Common myths about the Dominican Republic

Timeline of the Dominican Republic

What the map shows next

At 1846 on the map the map draws a country two years old and still at war with Haiti, with no roads, a capital that had been sacked in 1805 and fought over in 1844, and a government that had already exiled the men who founded it. The outline is the one Santana's militia defended in 1844–56; the interior is a scatter of cattle ranches and tobacco smallholdings.

1905 on the map shows the same territory under a receivership: the customs houses at Puerto Plata, Monte Cristi, Sánchez and Santo Domingo are collecting for American creditors, and the map's polygon is a state that has lost control of its own revenue. By 1937 on the map the frontier has become a line the army garrisons, and the massacre is weeks away; by 1965 on the map the country is drawn intact while American troops hold a corner of its capital. Note that the dataset does not draw the republic at all in 1861–64 or 1916–23 — the years of the Spanish annexation and the first American occupation — so the map's gaps fall exactly where the country's sovereignty was suspended.